Nursing Homes To Receive Ratings

The Listing Will Be Unveiled In Six Pilot States -- Including Florida -- Next Week.

April 7, 2002|By Ceci Connolly Washington Post

WASHINGTON -- Since the day Agnes Duckett was diagnosed with a rare brain disorder similar to Alzheimer's, her husband, Don, was determined to care for her himself. But when Agnes, 65, lost her ability to speak last year, Don was suddenly confronted with the awesome challenge of finding a nursing home for his wife of 48 years.

The financial worries and emotional toll were to be expected, he said. But the lack of reliable information on nursing homes in the Tacoma, Wash., area stunned him.

"There are at least 500,000 caregivers in the state of Washington," he said recently. "Those people have a need to be able to contact someone right now and get information that is not readily available. They don't know where to go for help."

Buy a car, refrigerator or computer in America today and there's a wealth of data on everything from price to reliability. But even the most sophisticated, diligent shopper would have trouble finding comparable information about America's 17,000 nursing homes.

Next week, the federal government will take its first step toward filling the void, unveiling ratings on every nursing home in six pilot states -- Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington. Tom Scully, architect of the controversial project, is betting that competition will do as much, if not more, to improve the quality of long-term care as any government regulation.

The market-oriented approach is built around the simple notion that information not only empowers consumers, but also forces "bad apples" in the industry up or out.

"People are entitled to know more about the quality of nursing homes," said Scully, director of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. "My view is this is 15 years overdue."

In theory, Scully's vision for a sort of Consumer Reports of long-term care is unanimously embraced. In practice, it has sent shock waves through an industry that feels battered by bad publicity and fears that low ratings will have severe financial repercussions. Elder advocates, meanwhile, remain deeply distrustful of any alliance between the Republican administration and corporate America.

"Nobody's going to be happy with this for a while," said Larry Minnix, president and chief executive officer of the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging. "There's just lots of potential for controversy. But it's the right thing to do."

Beginning a week from Monday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will publish the results of nine quality measurements in full-page newspaper ads and on the Internet. Although the government has collected the data for several years, this is the first attempt to translate it into user-friendly charts. A year from now, Scully hopes to publish the results nationwide.

The guide, headlined "How do your local nursing homes compare," tells families which homes, for instance, have a strong record treating pain and infection. It lists where physical restraints have been used and where residents have lost an inappropriate amount of weight. Nursing homes will not be ranked, but consumers will be able to compare homes with one another and with the state average.

"People looking for nursing homes have heard horror stories for many, many years," said Beth Irtz, administrator of Clear Creek Care Center in Colorado. "They'd like to have some hard data to evaluate a nursing home, and this gives them some."